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About Bellacoolablog

A blog about life in the Bella Coola Valley and the Central Coast area of British Columbia for anyone interested in an incredible and rich part of BC's coast. I hope to provide my thoughts about things as simple as weather observations and seasonal issues, to comments about life and the natural history in the Bella Coola Valley, the Central Coast and the west Chilcotin area.

Note: All photos on this blog were taken by the author unless otherwise noted. While the photos and written material are all the property of the author and protected by Copyright, I'm not a professional photographer and you can use the photos if a link or attribution is provided back to my blog. If you have a need to use a particular photo and you want the high resolution file, leave a comment with your email (I won't publish it) and we can discuss what use you intend the photo for. Grizzly

About Me

A resident of the Bella Coola Valley and observer of the natural history, geography, resources, regional climate and cultural history of the Bella Coola Valley, Central Coast and the West Chilcotin area of BC.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Chum Salmon

In early July I wrote a post about the fishing fleet and the first weeks of the chum fishery. There was some nervousness then about the early low numbers of chum salmon showing in the gillnet fishery, but it usually takes till past the middle of July to tell the story.

We are now at the end of the month and it seems like the chum run is returning in very low numbers to the Bella Coola River and the spawning tributaries, there has been very limited commercial fisheries and closures. I'm hearing that there will likely be no more now that numbers are not showing. Too bad, it's the second year in a row that the chum salmon return has been very low. Grizzly

2 comments:

Well, there are probably lots of opinions on that, but we did have some flooding conditions in 2006 which would affect the 4 yr old fish, but there is a large federal government hatchery that enhances chum and if it was just the flood the effects of it would have been buffered by hatchery production. This doesn't seem to have happened, so it points at something in the Pacific Ocean affecting survival. Grizzly